China takes fastest supercomputer crown

PORTLAND, Ore.—China has retaken the top slot on the twice-yearly Top500 List of supercomputers announced this week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany. The top high-performance computer (HPC) was China's Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2), which houses 3.12 million Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi cores, over five-times as many as the AMD/Nvidia powered second place Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and almost twice as many as the third-place IBM-powered Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Milky-Way-2, offering over 50-petaFLOPS of performance, will power the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China. Its 3.12 million cores are spread across 32,000 octal-core 22-nanometer Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors and 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor cards. The architecture is divided among 16,000 nodes each with two Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors. Milky-Way-2's peak performance of 54.9 petaFLOPS can be sustained indefinitely at 33.86 petaFLOPS on the standard Linpack benchmark.

The second place Titan, which was booted out of the top slot it won last year, was based on a Department of Energy (DoE) Cray-XK7 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and ran at 27 petaFLOPS peak (17.6 sustained) using over 18,688 AMD 16-core Opteron 6274 main processors and 261,632 of its NVIDIA K20x coprocessor cores, for a total of 560,640 cores.

The third-place Sequoia was based on an IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputer at the DoE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which won second-place last year, and ran at 20 petaFLOPS peak (17.2 sustained) using 98,304 Power BQC 16-core processors for a total of 1,572,864 cores.

The other top 10 supercomputers, in order of rank, include the Fujitsu's "K Computer" at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (Kobe, Japan), using 705,024 SPARC64 cores, a second BlueGene/Q system, called Mira, at Argonne National Laboratory with 786,432 cores, the Stampede at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (Austin) with 462,462 cores, the JUQUEEN at the Forschungszentrum Juelich Laboratory (Germany) with 458,752 cores, another IBM BlueGene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories with 393,216 cores, the SuperMUC, an IBM iDataplex at Leibniz Rechenzentrum (Germany) with 147,456, and the November 2010 winner, and predecessor to the MilkyWay-2, the MilkyWay-1A at the National Supercomputing Center (Tianjin, China) with 186,368 cores.

How effective are the parallel programming algorithms being used in these systems? 3 million cores are only effective when there are 3 million parallel inputs being processed. Other than real-time image processing / data visualization, at some point, the threads need to be consolidated to develop conclusions. I wonder what the ratio of "idle set-up" time to "productive processor time" is on such a system.

Weather forecasting based on simulation is one of the most demanding computational application for supercomputers (computational fluid dynamics). I am sure we can improve that way better than other forecasters like economists and t-leaves readers!
MP Divakar

Greg44, you are so right! Made me laugh when I read your comment on the weather predictions. I used to beat the local weatherman just by talking with a friend in upper NY state. I just asked them what their weather was like (already happened that day and current conditions), then add between 16 and 18 hours and presto our weather here in NH! I would think it would be easier to "predict" the weather if weathermen paid attention to conditions "upstream" rather than computer predictions..

it says 32000 Xeons + 48000 Phis
So, China is going to extend nuclear capabilities via numerical design?
Can't see any other reasonable target for such a massive centralized system (except for prestige, of course).

There was a time when export of technologies, like those Xeon chips, was strictly controlled by the US Commerce Department.
The schoolboy enthusiasm here at EE Times for "fastest" should be overwhelmed by committing actual JOURNALISM and posing the question of how a future nuclear adversary could get a hold of technology to enable the simulation of higher yield nuclear warheads.

Latest ranking at 33
Sunway BlueLight MPP, ShenWei processor SW1600 975.00 MHz, Infiniband QDR
http://www.top500.org/system/177447
ShenWei SW1600 with DEC Alpha instruction set
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShenWei
One interesting fact is that the first 3 generations of SW processors were 2 years apart, with the latest SW-1600 becoming available in 2010, or 3 years ago.
It is only ridiculous to assume there is no new development of the SW line of processor development.